WordPress is one of the world’s most popular web publishing platforms for building blogs and websites. It can be customized via a wide selection of themes, extensions and plug-ins.

Why use Bitnami WordPress?

Bitnami makes it easy to run WordPress in the cloud, virtually or locally in mere minutes. Bitnami WordPress is

Up-to-date:
We track every release of WordPress and update our stack shortly after it's released.

Secure:
If ever vulnerabilities or serious security issues are discovered, we provide new versions of WordPress as soon as possible, often within hours of the availability of a fix.

Consistent:
We package WordPress consistently every time so that the experience of deploying natively, as a virtual machine or hosting it in the cloud is nearly identical.

Free:
The Bitnami WordPress stack is distributed free under the Apache 2.0 license.

We take care of compiling and configuring WordPress and all of its dependencies (third-party libraries, runtime, and database) so it works out-of-the-box. It includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. With Bitnami WordPress, you can:

Experiment with an unlimited number of demos or plugins

Deploy it quickly, easily and consistently

Develop proof-of-concepts for your clients

Save money and improve reliability

Host WordPress in the cloud

Why WordPress?

WordPress is a popular blogging software and powers more than 10% of all websites globally. Developed by Automattic, WordPress rose to popularity quickly because of it's up-to-date development framework, extensive feature set, flexibility, rapid and multilingual publishing ability, multi-author support, and thriving community. Thousands of free and commercial themes and plugins are available to extend and personalize WordPress for just about every situation.

WordPress Hosting versus WordPress Cloud Hosting

There are many options for hosting WordPress, including scores of ISPs. Typically if you pay an ISP more money, you get more hands-on services, but after WordPress is initially configured, you may not need these costly monthly services. Cloud hosting has the many advantages over traditional ISP hosting including the efficiency, reliability and scalability that comes with the shared resources of cloud operations. In addition, cloud prices are dropping every few months and that savings is passed onto cloud customers.

A major hurdle for WordPress Hosting has been the difficulty of set up, configuration, and maintenance. That's where Bitnami can help. Our one-click images make it incredibly simple to launch WordPress in the cloud. In minutes you can have WordPress up-and-running, easily set the size of your servers, and monitor monthly costs – all without having to be an IT professional.

WordPress features include

Thousands of add-ons for ecommerce, SEO, email, spam filtering, analytics and more

Multi-user and multi-blogging capabilities

Multilingual support

SEO optimized

Plugin architecture and template engine

Solutions

WordPress is a powerful and flexible blog publishing platform. While it's best known and arguably most widely used for blogging, dozens of different solutions have been built by WordPress users. WordPress can be used for just about any online publishing scenario and can easily be extended with free or commercial plugins and add-ons. Some solutions include:

Build a blog or website

Install WordPress on your desktop, customize it and migrate it to the cloud or to another public hosting provider when you're ready.

Create a portfolio

WordPress is ideal for creating portfolios for photographers, videographers, writers and others who have a large body of work. There are many optional themes available for displaying portfolios.

Launch a store

WordPress is way more than a blog. Many people use it for building portfolios, as landing pages, and even for e-commerce (there are several plugins to choose from).

Your unique solution here

The beauty of WordPress is how flexible it is for building just about any publishing solution you can conceive of. And with Bitnami, you're 2-minutes away from launch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What components are included with an installation?

See our complete and up-to-date read me document for the specific names and versions of all open source components included.

Is it safe?

We work hard to ensure that Bitnami is a trusted platform. We take extensive steps to ensure that every application Bitnami packages is free of malware. We package software that is distributed by each manufacturer, run our own checks, and update software immediately when we learn of a vulnerability. In addition, we take precaution to protect our own customer information and never sell or give away our customer records. Learn more on our Terms of Use.

It's everything as promised

by
muxica
on
April 25, 2014

I set wordpress up with bitnami for development purposes. It was fast and simple to install. I love that it's a free service, however, I didn't like that there was advertisements involved. It's a pet peeve of mine when I attempt to install software and I'm barraged by advertisement. I block all banners on my web browsing, I don't even watch television because advertising tends to ruin the experience.

Thus I stopped using it. If you're fine with a little advertising, use this service, it's great!

Bitnami Stack for WordPress

by
Greg Raven
on
April 25, 2014

For years, when I needed a local instance of WordPress, I’d spend a few hours installing MySQL, hacking Apache config files, downloading and setting up WordPress, configuring my localhost to point to the WordPress install, etc. I could get it to work, but it was a real ordeal, and when I was done, WordPress would not install plug-ins and themes the normal way: I had to download them, manually install them, and then go back to WordPress to use them.

Then came MAMP, which made the set-up better, but installing plug-ins or themes still meant exiting WordPress, doing a manual download, moving the files to the correct folder, etc.

With Bitnami Stack for WordPress, everything is self-contained. You launch Bitnami Stack for WordPress, and not only is everything there, ready to go, but it works just like WordPress. What a deal! It might be my imagination, but I’m pretty certain that Bitnami Stack for WordPress runs faster than WordPress under MAMP Pro or when I roll my own.

The only quibble I have is that because I use BBEdit to work with theme files (instead of WordPress’ built-in editor, I have to go digging to get them: ~/Library/Containers/com.bitnami.wordpress/Data/app/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content/themes/. However, once I get there, I just make an alias of the theme folder and drag it to my desktop for instant access. Problem solved.

By the way, not only is Bitnami Stack for WordPress great for developing and/or tweaking your themes, but it’s fantastic for doing clean-up edits on your posts. Export from your live WordPress, import into Bitnami Stack for WordPress, and go to town. I’ve done this a couple times, once on a site that started out in WordPress a really long time ago so it had lots of interesting code variations in the posts, and a couple times on big conversion projects from Movable Type to WordPress. The near-instant response is extremely welcome when you’ve got hundreds or thousands of posts to munge.

Speaking of munging, Bitnami Stack for WordPress also includes phpMyAdmin, for those heavy-duty munging chores.

One of the easiest ways to try out Wordpress

Bitnami provides one of the easiest ways for people to try out Wordpress on their own computer. It doesn't matter what skill level the person is, or what kind of computer (pc/Mac/Linux) they have.

At a local wordpress meetup I used bitnami's Wordpress stack to teach a group of about 20 people how to set up a local installation of Wordpress for them to mess around with. This way they could try out different themes and plugins without potentially messing up the site that many of them were using to run their own businesses.